The Pharmacy of Euripides: Asclepius and the Theater of Dionysus
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Robin Mitchell-Boyask - April 6th, 1996 The Pharmacy of Euripides: Asclepius and the Theater of Dionysus If this road, before it opens into the grove of the Muses, leads us over by the temple of Asclepius, so is this for acquaintances of Aristotle only further proof that we are moving in the right footsteps. -- Jacob Bernays[1] Jacob Bernays, the first great proponent of the medical interpretation of Aristotelian catharsis (and the uncle of Sigmund Freud's wife), was closer to a truth about tragedy than he realized, because the Muses indeed are quite close to the temple of Asclepius. For if Aristotle ever did visit the Theater of Dionysus in Athens to witness dramatic performances, an activity he subordinated to reading, a few steps, even a brief glance over his shoulder, would have taken him into the Athenian City Asklepieion. In the following investigate the interplay the imagery of disease in drama with the development of the cult of the healing hero/god Asclepius in fifth-century Athens. Asclepius, a son of Apollo, invented the art of healing, and became so good at it that he attempted to resurrect mortals, for Zeus destroyed him. But the Greeks couldn't make up their mind about him, so in cultic practice he was a god. Recognizing in this study the link between medicine and poetry that the Athenians drew, we shall see the placement of the god of physical healing near the Theater turns it into a locus of therapy for the polis. Indeed, I shall further suggest in turn that it was the earlier associations among poetry, healing and immortality that might have led to the installation of Asclepius' shrine above the theater. Therefore, in this study I will need to move through a number of diverse and complex issues: the cult of Asclepius, the direct evocations of Asclepius in dramatic texts, the relaltionship of Apollo and Dionysus in cult, shrine locations, the City Dionysia, the Paian, katharsis , the great Plague, and nosological imagery tragic drama, especially Euripides. The Heracles will be of particular concern. I primarily focus on networks of conceptual associations, some easily recognizable, some latent, and thus for the latter especially I ask my audience to withhold judgment until all the ballots are counted. An often overlooked aspect of the performance of drama is the physical presence of the characters on stage. Unlike all other forms of literature, drama insists on the body's reality. It has been often said that Greek tragedy brings in conflict the cooperative values of the polis with the aristocratic ideals of the hero, but drama in performance sharpens the split even further by embodying these values and making them walk the stage. Solon, Plutarch reports, left the theater once in disgust at seeing these realized figures from the past undermining the political harmony he strove to achieve. The poet, like Asclepius, returns to life the heroes of the legendary past. Aristophanes, whose comedies show a thorough acquaintance with the cult of Asclepius, plays on this practice in the Frogs, as Dionysus specifically aims to resurrect not a hero, but a poet who will save Athens. Before Arisophanes and Euripides, Pindar's Pythian 3 epitomizes a recurrent Greek belief in the immortality that song confers as a recompense for inevitable death. The Language of Disease in Tragedy Several decades ago scholars dismissed the metaphorical aspects of disease in drama. The word nosos, they maintained with little evidence, was too much a part of everyday language to have any metaphorical significance. The Greeks, like us, tended to call bad things sick. They erred, I believe, in making sweeping assumptions about poetic language in its historical situation, and in not considering how their own historical conditions might affect the way they read Greek texts. I do not think that we can asume that a culture lacking immunization shots and anaesthetic, or a city that had lost 1/4 to 1/3 of its population from a Plague, would have let connectionsof bad things to the language of disease slip by too easily. [2] It is unreasonable to assume that metaphors which seem bland and worn to us and in our every-day language would have also sounded similarly to Athenians 2500 years ago. It is more helpful, I submit, to ask new questions and see whether a drama's use of nosos particpates in a larger structure of meaning for the drama and the culture that produces it. Understanding the force of nosological imagery requires resituating the dramatic texts historically,in both Euripides' century and ours. The afore-mentioned scholarship appeared between 1941 and 1962, a time when medicine has ameliorated, if not eliminated, most major curable diseases, and there was even hope for a cure for cancer. I suspect that metaphors of illness might not have had the appropriate resonance for those scholars and their colleagues. My impression of the modern history of the language of health is that words like "disease" and "plague" have much greater power now, in the era ofAIDS, than they did two or three decades previously. The great gulf separating us from antiquity, perhaps so great we cannot bridge it, is our relative inexperience of mortality. We now have so great a control over our bodies that our appreciations of diease- shortened lifespans and widespread infant mortality have severely lessened. The pervasive violence of American culture and our terror and panic before AIDS are both the surest signs of this diminishment as well as its possible reversal. Just as AIDS has changed the semantics of illness in modernity, the Great Plague in Athens surely deepened an Athenian audience's sensitivity to a dramatic poet's deployment of such language. And this is probably an understatement. If Thucydides' description of the plague is at all accurate, then we cannot underestimate the power in the theater words like nosos had.[3] I seek to discover the general metaphorical and semantic range that noss had in the Theater of Dionysus. Thucydides predominantly uses this moregeneral term, occasionally combining it with more specific adjectives like pestilent, but his descriptive language remains surprisingly non- specific;loimos itself is surprisingly rare. Nosos is also the predominant, if not exclusive, choice of Sophocles and Euripides. The specific term for plague, loimos, does not occur in the extant dramas of Euripides, and only once in Sophocles; line 28 of the Oedipus Tyrannus, the tragedy where one would most expect to find many instances. Sinceloimos does not present any metrical difficulties for a poet, this rarity might not entirely lack cause. Perhaps nosos becomes the word of choice for Thucydides and the tragedians because it tends to be used designate bad things in general. It’s very vagueness thus would lend nosos a greater metaphorical potentia. Despite the reasonably frequent occurrence of specific terms for maladies both physical and psychological in Aeschylus and Sophocles, the language of disease achieves almost startling prominence in Euripidean drama. Thus, here I shall attempt to sketch out the metaphorical possibilities for disease in Euripidean drama. First, however, we need to examine briefly the language of early Greek medicine, not only, as is typical practice, as a source for dramatic speech, but more for its use of political language to describe physical malady. I shall suggest then that Euripides later reverses the equation in employing medical language to depict political turmoil. Two central concepts to early Greek medicine especially relevant here are that diseases enter the body from the outside through poroi and that health depends a proper balance of the body's different components. The human body continually experiences attack from external sources.[4] Some of these external things enter the brain and are manifested in thought or sensation, and others introduce disease. The pre-Hippocratic writer Alcmaeon believed that good health arose from the equilibrium of the powers: "the bond of health is isonomia of the powers...., while the monarcia of one of them is the cause of disease..."[5] Health thus is cast as a political struggle between warring factions, almost a stasis. The comparison between the balance of the parts in a body and the state should sound familiar to students of Plato, and indeed Alcmaeon's theories influenced philosophers beginning with Empedocles, and, I believe, dramatists. Moreover, the image of one standing apart from the others, gaining control and threatening the whole sounds not only political, but also fairly like the basic structure of much Greek drama, and in turn it suggests a more powerful metaphorical potential for disease than we have suspected. Typically, tragedy sets in opposition the conflicting values of the democratic polis and the aristocratic hero, who is usually a member of the royal household that rules the city of the play's locale. Thus, by mirroring a constant political concern of fifth-century Athens, drama enacts the tensions between the needs of the many and the desires of the one. Given this political current in Greek medical thought, the obvious acquaintance of the tragedians with the Hippocratic writings, and the political setting of the City Dionysia, it should not be surprising that disease becomes a live, not a dead, metaphor for the crises afflicting the political communities on stage. This metaphor becomes especially common after the outbreak of the plague in Athens. The Cult of Asclepius and the Theater of Dionysus . The development of the cult of Asclepius in Athens and the range of myths involving him both associate him with Dionysus, the Greek god of, among other things, the theater. Thus, on the levels of theme, ritual and performance Asclepius is important to Greek drama in the last third of the fifth century and beyond.